proto essay on defense against strong frames and false n-chotomies

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I claim that most (all?) concepts are imperfect, by the nature of conceptualization.

I expect we should be especially wary of concepts that lead us to break what were once a myriad of largely undifferentiated perceptions into exactly two categories—especially when we did not ourselves come up with those categories while trying to make sense of our own observations, especially when we did not previously make any effort to make sense of our own observations, and especially especially when we notice ourselves employing the dichotomy all over the place immediately after gaining the concept.

This happened to me today, so i've been thinking about how to respond.

What is it to "be wary" in the relevant sense? What should a person do, when they notice that this has happened to them? When they notice that someone has just handed them a strong frame and now they're thinking in terms of that frame when they've never even attempted to deliberately observe the bit of territory that the frame supports, and have never tried to make sense of those observations themselves?

I think this kind of situation calls for cognitive first aid. There's a crucial moment in which you can either lock in your new unexamined and highly compressed way of perceiving the world, or you can become grounded in your own competence as an observer and thinker, thereby gaining the space needed to examine the new frame from the outside.

(Here's some space where you can pause to think of at least one way you might establish grounding in your own competence as an observer and thinker, before I tell you about my own way.)

I think a good thing to do is to leave the room (or close the book, or the tab, or the video, whatever) and spend at least five minutes attempting to get in direct contact with something.  ANYTHING. It does not have to be relevant to the domain of the concept. Best of it's not. Get out a pencil and sketch the tissue box in front of you. Find something growing in a crack in the sidewalk outside. Derive de morgan's law using a minimalistic set of derivation rules (like, just assumption plus operator introduction and elimination).

Then, once you're definitely in direct contact with a real thing that is not whatever concept has just been thrust upon you, spend at least five minutes working toward your own completely original taxonomy.

DO NOT START FROM THE CONCEPT YOU'VE JUST LEARNED AND ADJUST AWAY FROM THERE.

Start instead with some reference experiences: search your memory for specific things that actually happened to you, or that you heard about once, that seem like they might be sort of relevant. Better yet, make some brand new observations, if possible. Then try to build your own taxonomy of those experiences.

In my case today, this would be a taxonomy of social utterances. I've just produced a whole bunch of them myself, so these sentences are a fine place to start. I also remember my dad saying, "I'm your father, not your friend." I remember my neighbor telling me it's fine to leave the pothole filling party any time and that he's grateful for any amount of time I can contribute. Facebook, Wikipedia, Reddit, and every book I own are made almost entirely of social utterances. If I go downstairs to say "hello" to my fiance, social utterances will almost certainly pour out of both of us. I can use any of these sources to sketch taxonomies.

Here is a brainstorm of things that might belong in a taxonomy of social utterances, which I've not yet begun to organize into a rough hierarchy:

• stuff people say because they want you to feel something
• stuff people say because they want you to know something
• stuff people say because they want you to believe something
• stuff people say because they want you to be aware of some things
• stuff people say because they want you to __not__ be aware of some things
• stuff people say because they want you to conceive of your relationship to them in a certain way
• stuff people say that has nothing to do with you
• stuff people say because they want you to say something to them
• stuff people say to change your expectations about what they will do
• stuff people say when they want everyone in earshot to know that everyone in earshot has heard what they have said

I cannot make a list like this without at least beginning to accumulate questions. That's part of Thinking, for me. Here are some accumulated questions.

• what is shitposting?
• how are Facebook utterances different from Wikipedia utterances?
• when am I most often confused about why a person is saying a thing?
• why do almost all of my categories include "because" and "want"? what if I made a taxonomy of social utterances that does not involve whatever's behind "because", or whatever's behind "want"?
• why do I dislike certain kinds of social utterances?
• what are non-social utterances?
• why do people say things to make other people feel certain ways? (eg humor to make people feel amusement)
• why would someone want everyone in earshot to know that everyone in earshot has heard the thing?
• why do we talk?
• what can talking do that slapping cannot?
• what is fiction?
• what is playing pretend?
• how does sarcasm work? when does it not work? what is it good for?
• when is gossip useful? when is it harmful? why do the first things I think about gossip involve valuations?

The point of this exercise I've just done is not that I may come up with a better conceptualization than the one that lead me to seek cognitive first aid to stay cognitively healthy and strong (though that certainly happens now and then).

The point is that I've reminded myself that the world is complicated, that any given conceptualization of it attempts to compress an enormous amount of information, and that I am capable of finding my own ways to think about the world. I am now grounded in my own abilities as an observer and thinker, and I remember what it feels like to do something besides capitulate to some big concept I was just handed.

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This proto-post has been brought to you by Anna's essay on Narrative Synching, which I found something-like disturbingly compelling.

Suppose you wanted to improve your social relationships on the community level. (I think of this as “my ability to take refuge in the sangha”.) What questions might you answer now, and then again in one year, to track your progress?

Here’s what’s come to mind for me so far. I’m probably missing a lot and would really like your help mapping things out. I think it’s a part of the territory I can only just barely perceive at my current level of development.

• If something tragic happened to you, such as a car crash that partially paralyzed you or the death of a loved one, how many people can you name whom you'd find it easy and natural to ask for help with figuring out your life afterward?
• For how many people is it the case that if they were hospitalized for at least a week you would visit them in the hospital?
• Over the past month, how lonely have you felt?
• In the past two weeks, how often have you collaborated with someone outside of work?
• To what degree do you feel like your friends have your back?
• Describe the roll of community in your life.
• How do you feel as you try to describe the roll of community in your life?
• When's the last time you got angry with someone and confronted them one on one as a result?
• When's the last time you apologized to someone?
• How strong is your sense that you're building something of personal value with the people around you?
• When's the last time you spent more than ten minutes on something that felt motivated by gratitude?
• When a big change happens in your life, such as loosing your job or having a baby, how motivated do you feel to share the experience with others?
• When you feel motivated to share an experience with others, how satisfied do you tend to be with your attempts to do that?
• Do you know the love languages of your five closest friends? To what extent does that influence how you behave toward them?
• Does it seem to you that your friends know your love language?
• To what extent do you “know how to have friends”?
• Describe your relationship with your boss.
• Describe your relationships with your co-workers.
• When you think about being part of a church, how much longing do you feel?
• When you notice that you feel lonely or isolated, how do you tend to respond?
• How satisfied do you tend to be with your response to feelings of loneliness or isolation?
• Imagine that you suddenly had to move to another city where nobody knew you and there were no rationalists or EAs. How surprised would you be to hear that within two years, you’d feel well supported by a warm and friendly network of local social connections?
• Excluding people who live in your house, how many faces can you picture of the people who live on your street? How many of them could you greet by name? How many of them have you spoken to in the past month? How many of them have you helped with something? How many of them have helped you with something?
• When you think about your participation in your community, what do you feel dissatisfaction or longing about?
• If you suddenly moved to another city, how big is the hole you would leave in your community? What would be its shape? In what ways and to what extent have the people around you come to depend on you?
• How much stronger are you with your community than without it? In what ways, specifically, have you allowed it to support you over the past year, and how much benefit did you gain from that?

Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about monographs .

“A monograph is a specialist work of writing… or exhibition on a single subject or an aspect of a subject, often by a single author or artist, and usually on a scholarly subject… Unlike a textbook, which surveys the state of knowledge in a field, the main purpose of a monograph is to present primary research and original scholarship ascertaining reliable credibility to the required recipient. This research is presented at length, distinguishing a monograph from an article.”

I think it’s a bit of an antiquated term. Either that or it’s chiefly British, because as an American I’ve seldom encountered it.

I know the word because Sherlock Holmes is always writing monographs. In *A Study In Scarlet*, he says, “I gathered up some scattered ash from the floor. It was dark in colour and flakey—such an ash as is only made by a Trichinopoly. I have made a special study of cigar ashes—in fact, I have written a monograph upon the subject. I flatter myself that I can distinguish at a glance the ash of any known brand, either of cigar or of tobacco.” He also has a monograph on the use of disguise in crime detection, and another on the utilities of dogs in detective work.

When I tried thinking of myself as writing “monographs” on things, I broke though some sort of barrier. The things I wrote turned out less inhibited and more… me. I benefited from them myself more as well.

What I mean by “monograph” is probably a little different from what either Sherlock or academia means, but it’s in the same spirit. I think of it as a photo study or a character sketch, but in non-fiction writing form.

Here are my guidelines for writing a monograph.

1. Pick a topic you can personally investigate. It doesn’t matter whether it’s “scholarly”. It’s fine if other people have already written dozens of books on the subject, regardless of whether you’ve read them, just as long as you can stick your own nose in the actual subject matter as well. It would be hard for me to write a monograph on the cognitive effects of blood redistribution in high-G environments, because I don’t own a fighter jet. But I could absolutely write a monograph on the cognitive effects of blood redistribution during physical inversion, because I can do a handstand against the wall or hang upside down from a horizontal bar.

2. Write down dozens of questions about the topic. Yes, really, dozens. They don’t have to be good questions. Do this in brainstorming mode. Afterward, highlight the questions you feel particularly drawn to. Don’t leave out anything you feel a burning itch to know, even if it seems literally impossible to answer.

3. Pick one of your questions and start writing about it. As you write, do whatever investigations occur to you, and write about them. Favor methods that put you in more direct contact with the territory, even when you expect you could read about someone else’s investigations. Please do write later about somebody’s meta-analysis on whether things fall up, but go drop a bunch of pencils on your own first.

4. Do this with all of the questions on your list that call to you. When you’re done, you’ve written a monograph.

Now that you have some idea of what the heck I’m even doing, maybe I’ll feel more comfortable sharing my monographs here. My plan is to publish them little by little as I write, so other people can influence my investigations. You’ll get a series of “essays”, but they may be in a wide range of styles and formats from poetry to data sets to expository prose, the better to see the topic from many perspectives.

I've lately been thinking that the rationality I practice, develop, and sometimes teach, is better described as a "discipline" than an "art". Discipline like "an activity, exercise, or regimen that develops or improves a skill", or "to bring to a state of order and obedience by training and control".

The closest dictionary.com definition of "art" that looks very relevant to me is "any field using the skills or techniques of [the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance]".

"The art of rationality" sounds a little too much to me like "we follow our whims and focus on the shiny things", whereas "the discipline of rationality" has a lot more of "and then I did the hard and boring thing for the 10,000th time in a row because there's simply no better way to hone a reflex or maintain form over time".

I don't intend to be mean to art here; I consider myself somewhat of an artist, in visual, written, and perhaps kinesthetic media. And it definitely takes a lot of discipline, as well as a bit of science, to make good art reliably. But what is it that makes a practice more of an art, rather than more of a something-else? I think it has something to do with a focus on expression. You experience a recognition of beauty or quality or significance, and then you create an expression of whatever you felt in response to the experience.  Art is about expressing beauty. ("Express" in the sense of "to show, manifest, or reveal".) 

Is rationality about expressing beauty?

No!

Rationality is about figuring out how to not do quite so much dumb shit all the time, in the course of trying not to do quite so much dumb shit all the time.

Which I readily admit is beautiful. But I think that's incidental?

Rationality tends to benefit from some tools that are relevant to artists, such as skillful perception, and perhaps others but honestly that's the only one I have in mind right now. But it draws a lot more heavily on the tools of science, statistics, and psychology than on the tools of art.

"The art of rationality" sounds cool, but just like "martial arts", it's... sort of misleading, and I worry it contributes to a concept of rationality that does not include the forbearance, dedication, persistence, patience, discipline that is actually required.

Edit: Someone on the Facebook version of this brought up the "art of war", and I replied, "i guess i've just never gotten this use of 'art'. i think i hear it as 'people do it and also we don't really understand it and also rather than wishing we understood it we glorify the mystery'.

Edit edit: More from Facebook:

i agree with a lot of these... "criticisms" seems a bit too strong for what they actually are. i agree with stuff in a lot of these comments, especially the Duncan things. i could tell even as i was writing the OP that something was coming out sideways. i'd like to find the Something that came out sideways and do something a bit more productive with it, though. like, i wrote the stuff in the OP because i have a frustration and a longing, and it has a lot more to do with the goodness of "discipline" than with the badness of "art".

i think rationality enthusiasts, perhaps in part because of founder effects and/or programmer culture?, tend to have a sort of laziness fetish or something that has huge benefits and also seems to me to have lead to a ton of throwing-out-the-baby-with-the-bath-water.

[One commenter] sais, "for me the word "discipline" has a connotation of "willpower", which doesn't quite work for me with regards to rationality. It reminds me of something I think you (?) wrote on Facebook some time ago. Badly paraphrased from my lousy memory, it was something like: "Lots of rationality advice can be boiled down to: 'See that dumb thing your brain does? Don't do that.'""

(i did indeed say something like that.)

i don't know what or how real [commenter] thinks, but there's a kind of person i'm quite certain exists who could well have uttered such a paragraph, who isn't very aware that they're breaking their conceptualization of deliberate action into a false dichotomy like "manifest outcomes through blunt force of will" and "do the things that are cheap and easy for you but otherwise just let things happen". i conjecture that the history of rationality over the past ten years involves a lot of taking this dichotomy for granted and only seriously considering practices that are cheap and easy, because, obviously, relying on blunt force of will all the time is very stupid.

according to me, there's this entire realm of human virtue/skill/enculturation/training that involves... i don't know, the closest i've ever come to trying to say it is my essay on patient observation at the end of the naturalism series, and the painting that's in it. some things that remind me of it include courage, the bit in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance where he talks about how to paint, the strengths that my stereotype of people in the military and also ancient Greek heroes have but my dancing buddies and contemporary liberal culture in general seems to lack or sometimes even disparage, an expectation that life is hard and part of being good human is not just insisting on the world being different but also developing what's needed to cope gracefully with reality as it currently exists. i dunno that's maybe just one corner of the thing.

anyway i think part of what i'm doing with myself in general is advocating for the deliberate development of some relatively unpleasant human capacities such as patience and not shutting down when there is danger and not giving up immediately when things seem dauntingly complicated. and the OP came from some not-yet-satisfactorilly-expressed motivation for that project.

and "discipline" is often my shorthand for a big chunk of that cluster of stuff.

here is how to cast a spell. (quick writeup of a talk i gave at DunCon)

Short Version
1. have an intention for change.
2. take a symbolic action representing the change.

that's it. that's all you need. but also, if you want to do it more:

Long Version

Prep

1. get your guts/intuition/S1/unconscious in touch with your intention somehow, and work through any tangles you find.

2. choose a symbolic action representing (and ideally participating in) the change you want, and design your spell around that. to find the right action, try this thought experiment: one day you wake up, and find you're living in the future where you've completely succeeded at getting the thing you want. you stretch and open your eyes. what's the very first thing that tips you off that something's different?

3. when it's time, lay out your materials and do any other physical/logistical prep work.

The Spell Itself

4. dedicate a sacred space (aka "cast a circle"). for example, carry incense around the space three times, or pour a circle of oats, or just move stuff out of the way. maybe ask something that vibes with protection and/or sacredness for you to help (such as a nearby river, or the memory of your grandfather).

5. raise energy. this means, do something that requires effort and focus and that invites your unconscious to the party while getting it engaged with the materials of your spell. maybe chant something relevant, or hold your hands over the magic herbs while pretending you can pour your intention into them. this is not the symbolic action; it just prepares you for the symbolic action.

6. release energy (that is, cast the spell). take the symbolic action you've planned. cut the string, drink the potion, burn the paper, whatever.

Conclude

7. seal the spell. do something that means "i'm now on the other side, in the post-spell world". the wiccans say "so mote it be". the christians say "amen". if your spell involved a jar, you could literally seal it with wax. i once did a spell involving a pair of earrings, which i sealed by putting the earrings on.

8. ground. "return excess energy to the earth." do something that gradually brings you back to a more ordinary state of mind. maybe imagine roots reaching down from your body deep into the earth and pretend you can equalize with the ground by sending your breath down and up those roots. or shake yourself like a wet dog. or eat a piece of cake.

9. release the space. thank whatever helped you cast the circle, then take an action that's the reverse of whatever you did to dedicate the space. walk the circle backward, or put all the furniture back.

Reinforce

10. choose at least one concrete action to take in line with your intention, and take that action. bonus points if it's a repeated action, like "every sunday i'll call my mom"

now, obviously 10 is the physical mechanism by which a change might happen in the physical world. but i recommend trying to answer for yourself, "how could including 1-9 possibly be superior in some way to jumping straight to 10?"


Hypnotic Framing

one more model of spellcasting: a spell is a self-hypnosis script.

standard hypnosis has 6 parts: 
1. pre-talk
2. an induction
3. a deepener (sometimes)
4. a suggestion(s) (pre- or post-hypnotic)
5. an awakener
6. following a post-hypnotic suggestion if one was given

In the Long Version above, 

1-3 is pre-talk,
4 is an induction
5 is a deepener
6 and 7 are a post-hypnotic suggestion
8 and 9 are awakeners
10 is following the post-hypnotic suggestion.
 

A surface-level summary of my work from the past 5-10 years in one sentence: Trigger-action planning is better when supported by prospective memory training.

"What did pregnancy do to your cognition?"

(Interested in responses to this from other people who have been pregnant, but here's my own answer.)

I think the main thing pregnancy seemed to do to my mind was reduce my associative speed. This had all kinds of effects on the rest of my cognition and experience, because it's a capacity I rely on almost constantly, but I think this was the central mechanism.

I'm not sure I have my concepts carved up right here, but by "associative speed" I mean "the thing that lets your thoughts go far and fast during a babble challenge". During pregnancy I'd try to do a task like "What does the smell of this chocolate make me think of?" and nothing would come to me for ages and ages (by which I mean a full one to three seconds), and then tiny bits of things would trickle in, but with no vibrancy or motion, no suggestion of more thoughts coming on their tails.

At the height of my mnemonics training, when I was super buff in raw creativity muscles, I'd try something like that and it was an almost overwhelming flood of life-like imaginings that felt effortless, almost like closing your eyes on mushrooms. My brain on pregnancy was the opposite of that, and it felt like death.

I was terrified that my associative speed would stay that low forever. Six weeks postpartum, it's not quite back to normal yet, but I think it's close.

Thread on The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis

I've recently written up an overview of my naturalism project, including where it's been and where it's headed. I've tried this a few times, but this is the first time I'm actually pretty happy with the result. So I thought I'd share it.

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In the upcoming year, I intend to execute Part Three of my naturalism publication project.

(Briefly: What is naturalism? 

Naturalism is an investigative method that focuses attention on the points in daily life where subjective experience intersects with crucial information. It brings reflective awareness to experiences that were always available, but that our preconceptions inclined us to discard; it thereby grants us the opportunity to fold those observations into our stories about the world. It is a gradual process of original seeing, clarification, and deconfusion. At its best, naturalism results in a greater ability to interact agentically with the world as it is, rather than fumbling haphazardly through a facade of misapprehensions.) 

Part Zero of the project was developing the basic methodology of naturalism, on my own and in collaboration with others. If you start counting at my first essays on “tortoise skills” and "noticing", it took about six years.

In Part One, I tried to communicate the worldview of naturalism. In a LessWrong sequence called "Intro to Naturalism", I picked out the concepts that seem foundational to my approach, named them, and elaborated on each. The summary sentence is, "Knowing the territory takes patient and direct observation." Creating the sequence wasn't just a matter of writing; in search of an accurate and concise description, I continued running and revising the curriculum, worked things out with other developers, and ran an experimental month-long course online. Part One took one year.

In Part Two, I tried to communicate the methodology of naturalism, in the relatively linear and self-contained form of a curriculum. (The actual practice is messier than that.) After a lot of testing and revising, I published a second sequence called "The Nuts and Bolts of Naturalism".

Part Three will demonstrate the method. I will choose a topic to be the subject of a naturalist study (probably something from the Sequences or the CFAR handbook, to start), learn what I can about it over the course of one week to three months while taking many notes, and compose an account of the process and my findings. I expect that each piece will be similar to my post “Investigating Fabrication”, but better. 

Then, I will choose a new subject, and do it again. I'll continue until I've covered a range of topics and shown several ways of wrestling with relevant challenges, then I'll tie everything into another LessWrong sequence on naturalism. In addition to generating some real-life, detailed, concrete examples of every part of the naturalist methodology, I hope that this part of the project will provide a few valuable companion pieces to existing writings on applied rationality. 

(I also have a bit of a hope that I'll get others to join me for some of these studies and to publish their own accounts.)

Although I hope that the direct products of Parts One through Three are worthwhile in themselves, I do not consider any of them to be complete. I think that the philosophy, methodology, and demonstration are all essential to mastering naturalism, so my ultimate goal with this project is Part Four: A comprehensive manual of naturalism that weaves together the previous parts. I may attempt to publish Part Four in print, and not just as a LessWrong sequence.